breeders cup championship

maximum of 14 starters are allowed in each of the 14 Breeders' Cup Championships races with the exception of the Dirt Mile, Juvenile Fillies Turf and Juvenile Turf which will each be limited to 12 starters. Breeders' Cup Limited has adopted a field selection system to select runners in the event fields are oversubscribed. This system ranks horses in order of preference based upon (1) performance in Breeders' Cup Challenge Races, (2) a point system, and (3) the judgment of a panel of racing experts. The field selection system will be implemented as necessary following the taking of pre-entries on October 14, 2008, to officially rank the oversubscribed fields. The Racing Directors/Secretaries Panel (the “Panel”) will rank all the horses pre-entered in the oversubscribed races as described below. After pre-entry, any vacancies in the fields will be filled by horses in order of panel preference.
Through 2006, there were eight races on the Breeders' Cup card, all classified as Grade I races. In 2007, three races — Dirt Mile, Filly and Mare Sprint, and Juvenile Turf — were added, all of them run the Friday before the remaining eight races. Three more new races — a Turf Sprint, Juvenile Filly Turf and Marathon — were also added for 2008.[2]
The order of the races on the card has changed many times throughout the event's history, but the Turf and Classic are traditionally the last two races. Starting in 2008, Day 1 of the event will be dedicated to races for fillies and mares, with Day 2 featuring all other races.The new races cannot be considered graded stakes in 2007, 2008, or 2009.[3] The American Graded Stakes Committee of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, the body that controls grading of North American stakes races, requires that a race be run under the same conditions for at least two years before it can be graded.
The 2007 Dirt Mile was run over 1 mile and 70 yards, while the 2007 Filly & Mare Sprint was run over six furlongs. These distances were required because of the configuration of the dirt track at the 2007 Breeders' Cup site of Monmouth Park.
The 2008 Turf Sprint will be contested on Santa Anita Park's signature El Camino Real “downhill” turf course, with a maximum of 14 starters. In future years, the distance will depend on track configurations.[4]
Beginning in 2007, a new qualifying process took effect, in which the winners of certain races earned automatic entry to the event in their respective divisions.
NBC had broadcast every Breeders' Cup from its inception in 1984 through 2005. Starting in 2006, ESPN took over the television contract for eight years. On June 2, 2008, it was announced that ABC would televise a portion of the Saturday card from 1-3:30 PM Eastern before moving back to ESPN. ESPN2 airs the Friday Card.
Trevor Denman is the voice of the Breeders' Cup. He began in 2006. All previous Breeders' Cup races were called by Tom Durkin from 1984 through 2005.
Hollywood Park is a thoroughbred race course and poker card room in Inglewood, California, about three miles (5 km) from Los Angeles International Airport and adjacent to the ForumThe track was opened in 1938 by the Hollywood Turf Club [1]. The racetrack was designed by noted racetrack architect Arthur Froehlich. Its chairman was Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, and its 600 shareholders included many other Hollywood luminaries. Al Jolson and Raoul Walsh were members of the founding Board of Directors and Mervyn LeRoy was a director from 1941 until his death in 1986.
Hollywood Park closed from 1942 to 1944 due to World War II, being used as a storage facility. In 1949, the grandstand and clubhouse were destroyed by a fire; the rebuilt facility reopened in 1950. In 1984, the race track was extended by a quarter of a mile prior to the first Breeders Cup race. [2]A card club casino was added to the complex in 1994. Churchill Downs, Inc. bought the facility for $140 million in 1999.
In July 2005, Churchill Downs sold the track to the Bay Meadows Land Company for $260 million in cash. Under the terms of the deal, the company, which operates Bay Meadows in San Mateo, was to continue thoroughbred racing at Hollywood Park for at least three years. According to Bay Meadows officials, the continuation of Hollywood Park as a racing venue after that depends on California allowing more gambling, like slot machines, to the track. (The Orange County Register, July 7, 2005)
Some of the Hollywood Park land has been sold to real estate developers to build a new housing community called the Inglewood Renaissance. Development began in 2005.
New grass was planted on the turf course after Hollywood Park's spring-summer meet in 2005. Due to safety concerns, however, turf racing was not conducted for that year's autumn meet. As a result, several major stakes races that comprised Hollywood's Autumn Turf Festival were cancelled that year.
After the conclusion of Hollywood's spring-summer meet in 2006, it was announced that a second chute would be built inside the turf course to accommodate sprint races at six furlongs. This follows a similar move by Monmouth Park to build a turf chute for sprint races.
Notable events at the track:
Hosted the inaugural Breeders' Cup in 1984 and also hosted the event in 1987 and 1997. In 1951, Citation became the first million-dollar-winning horse by winning his final start, the Hollywood Gold Cup. On December 10, 1999, Laffit Pincay, Jr. surpassed Bill Shoemaker's all-time record for race wins by a jockey. Cesario (JPN) becomes the first Japanese-bred, Japan-based racehorse to win an American stakes race in nearly 50 years, winning the July 2005 American Oaks. The track has a one and one-eighth mile dirt oval. It also has a one mile turf oval. The track regularly seats 10,000 people. A new Cushion Track racing surface was installed in September, 2006 to replace the existing dirt, making Hollywood Park the first track in California to meet the California Horse Racing Boards guideline that all tracks in the state replace dirt surfaces with a safer artificial surface by the end of 2007